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Think Sequential, Run Parallel

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Symposium on Real-Time and Hybrid Systems

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11180))

Abstract

Parallel computation is often a must when processing large-scale graphs. However, it is nontrivial to write parallel graph algorithms with correctness guarantees. This paper presents the programming model of \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\), a parallel GRAPh Engine [19]. \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\) allows users to “plug in” sequential (single-machine) graph algorithms as a whole, and it parallelizes the algorithms across a cluster of processors. In other words, it simplifies parallel programming for graph computations, from think parallel to think sequential. Under a monotonic condition, it guarantees to converge at correct answers as long as the sequential algorithms are correct. We present the foundation underlying \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\), based on simultaneous fixpoint computation. As examples, we demonstrate how \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\) parallelizes our familiar sequential graph algorithms. Furthermore, we show that in addition to its programming simplicity, \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\) achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art graph systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    \({\mathsf {GraphLab}} _{{\mathsf {sync}}}\) and \({\mathsf {GraphLab}} _{{\mathsf {async}}}\) run different modes of \(\mathsf {GraphLab}\) (PowerGraph).

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Acknowledgments

The paper is a tribute to Professor Chaochen Zhou, who took Fan as an MSc student 30 years ago, despite pressure from a powerful person, whom Fan confronted to get justice done for his late former MSc adviser. The authors are supported in part by 973 Program 2014CB340302, ERC 652976, EPSRC EP/M025268/1, NSFC 61421003, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing, Shenzhen Peacock Program 1105100030834361, and Joint Research Lab between Edinburgh and Huawei.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Wenfei Fan & Ruiqi Xu

  2. Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Wenfei Fan, Muyang Liu, Lei Hou, Dongze Li & Zizhong Meng

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  1. Wenfei Fan
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  2. Muyang Liu
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Correspondence to Wenfei Fan , Lei Hou , Dongze Li or Zizhong Meng .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

    Cliff Jones

  2. National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

    Ji Wang

  3. Institute of Software, CAS, Beijing, China

    Naijun Zhan

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Fan, W., Liu, M., Xu, R., Hou, L., Li, D., Meng, Z. (2018). Think Sequential, Run Parallel. In: Jones, C., Wang, J., Zhan, N. (eds) Symposium on Real-Time and Hybrid Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11180. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01461-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01461-2_1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01461-2

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